Whose Side Are You On?

Our Guest Blogger, Melanie Holmes, offers her perspective as a mother who chooses to respect a woman's choices rather than pick sides. Holmes writes:

Beyoncé is not “feminist enough.”

bell hooks is “too feminist.”

Some women are not “mom enough” because they don’t wear their babies, breastfeed, or co‑sleep. 

Others are not “woman enough” because they don’t want motherhood.

When are we going to refrain from trying to define what “fulfilled” or “happy” looks like for each other? 

I am a mother of a teenage daughter whose life is spread out before her, and I absolutely refuse to define “happiness” for her.    

Happiness is subjective.  Calista* always dreamed of being a teacher.  What she didn’t dream of was being a mom.  Calista doesn’t volunteer her thoughts on this topic because she feels embarrassed by the reactions she receives.  Knowing I’m a mother who believes in the right of every woman to decide if motherhood is the right path, Calista remarked, “I’m so glad there are people like you on our side.” 

Because of my refusal to espouse one side or the other, the book I’ve been writing for three years was passed over by a major publisher who thought I needed to pick a side.  However, that would defeat my entire thesis, which is:  We need to equip females with the facts and then give them the freedom to decide if they want motherhood.  What makes my voice unique is that I am a mom.

Often, women who are moms espouse sentiments such as, “My life was meaningless until I became a mom.”  But do women really mean this or are they gushing about the love they feel for their children?

I have interviewed/polled 200 women, mostly in the U.S.  Overwhelmingly, women hold assumptions about other women – that down deep, women who aren’t moms miss out on the quintessential female experience.  But assumptions are discrete from words.  Only half the moms said they would cajole their daughters toward motherhood if they heard ambivalence.  The other half said they would respect their daughters’ journey.  One mom said, “Motherhood is too personal a choice for me to interfere.” 

Dating to the 18^th century, mothers have fought for women’s rights, such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Perkins Gillman.  Harriet Beecher Stowe said, “I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother, I was…broken-hearted with the…injustice I saw.”  She was referring to the slave trade, and babies torn from their mothers’ arms.  20^th-century activist Tillie Olsen spoke out against the silencing of voices of those disadvantaged by gender, class and race. 

Madelyn Cain joined her voice to Wollstonecraft, Perkins, Stowe, and Olsen by writing The Childless Revolution in 2001.  Cain shed a light on the realities of 21^st century women who are not mothers ‑‑ that they are not selfish people living empty loveless lives.    

Words matter.  And it matters who says the words. 

I add my name to the list of mothers who wish to speak up for women’s rights as a way of paving a smoother road for their daughters.  By fighting for justice for all women, my daughter will benefit.

My husband and I are cautious of the scripts we use.  Rather than saying to our daughter, “When you have a child…” we say, “If you ever have a child…”  I want her to hear the things I never considered while growing into the woman that I am.  This is not to say that I regret being a mom.  But that’s my journey.  And it may not be my daughter’s.  After all, she’s only 16. 

As women come to grips with how much the world has changed over the past few decades, they also need to come to grips with each other.  This is not dodge ball.  We shouldn’t divvy up sides.  As women, we should all be on the same side.

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* Name has been changed.




Photo Credit: R.L. Holmes

 

The Journey to Me

We all start out child-free and somewhere along the way paths diverge, and mine lead to being childless by choice, even though I had to have a life-altering surgery at the tender, single age of 27, that rendered me incapable of bearing fruit. Fruit of the womb, that is.

It has been a long journey to becoming childfree me. I don't like to have my choice taken away from me. After the surgery, I walked the infertile couple path. We were not rich enough to even consider adoption or in-vitro. I felt trapped by my lack of options and by the horrible, emotional experience of wanting something that you cannot have. Something as complicated as love is never quite this simple, but looking back, I think my infertility was merely a trigger for the collapse of my first marriage. His drive to be childed was simply stronger than mine, though I could not articulate it at the time. I was just misarable. So, I exited stage left to explore this option solo.

A decade later, I thought for sure the conversation with my new boyfriend, the one I was slowing falling in love with, would be heart-wrenching. I knew that I had an obligation to tell him I would not be his "baby-mamma" before we went any further. To my surprise, he had already determined for himself that having children was not high on his list. After we married, I discovered the motivation for his decision was based on a lesson in over-population that he was exposed to as a sophomore in high school. His parents had taken the whole family to the world's fair in Spokane, Washington in 1974. A bell rang every five minutes, indicating that another child was born. This conscious-raising stunt had a profound impact on this thinking young man. He realized that the world did not need more children. Perhaps the message rang a little strong with him since he is one of five children. The product of two large traditionally Catholic families. Now, I love to hear him tell this story to a receptive audience.

My personal journey to childfree included blogging about it exclusively for two years at Purple Women & Friends. I didn't like the terms others applied to my brand of childlessness, so I created my own nomenclature around the subject. At the time, my husband and I found ourselves in the social petrie dish of being an expat in Canada. I was also turning 40 and had lots of time on my hands for life review and the blogosphere was my medium. In my 30s, I was still looking for childfree role models and I interviewed and befriended many. Along the way, I discovered and read several books on the subject, some humorous, some humorous only to some, all enlightening. We can definitely use more thoughtful exploration, both fiction and non-fiction in this arena, and I for one am really looking forward to the book and documentary film being produced by my friend and former PW&F co-contributor, Laura Scott, the owner of this blog.

All the online journaling and the childfree adult friendships I made along the way have made me less susceptible to thoughtless comments made by others about my chosen childless by choice status. But still I was a little unnerved when I was invited to be a panelist and moderator at the 2008 BlogHer Conference in San Francisco at an experimental Childfree Women Bloggers session. During my "purple" years, I created a reputation for being a reasonable voice on this often hot topic and an even-handed moderator of this multiple-voice team blog. I had actively lobbied BlogHer and other social networking sites for inclusion in our own separate category, since mom bloggers seemed to dominate all conversations. There never seemed to be a proper category to fit our uniquely focused blog. It was hard to promote, and our chance to gain more readers and expand the conversation was dampened by this reality. So, to be invited to participate in such a panel was an achievement of sorts, and I simply could not refuse.

Laura joined me on the BlogHer "Childless in the Blogosphere" panel. It was a good experience. The panel was attended by more than 50 women bloggers. At the end of the day, I realized I had become the role model I was seeking. My Purple Women blog is now closed, though the content is all there and searchable by topic, but my journey is far from over and I am happy to join this blog as contributor so I can continue to explore the role and phenomenon of childfree adults in our society.

Next post by Teri: Invisible Citizens - Childless by Choice Adults

(Or, let us know what you'd like to read about!)

Parenthood is Not Fun for Every One

There is an assumption we make as a culture that says “You may not want kids now, but it’s different when they’re your own.”

After this week I’m not so sure this little birdie can fly. First was the news that the state of Nebraska’s “Safe Haven” law will have to be rewritten because people are abandoning their adolescents and teens at the safe haven hospital sites instead of newborns, which the law was originally intended to protect. In fact, the majority of the seventeen kids who have been abandoned at Nebraska hospitals since the law went into effect last July are over ten years old.

If it is different when they’re yours, then why are parents abandoning their kids? They are no longer colicky, they are, hopefully, toilet trained, and, bonus, they can dress themselves, yet their parents and guardians are clearly not in love with the parenting role.

Which brings me to the second thing—a quote from one of my interviews for the Childless by Choice Project in which Susan Jeffers, a parent and author of the book I’m Okay, You’re a Brat!: Setting the Priorities Straight and Freeing You from the Guilt and Mad Myths of Parenthood said: “I’m not talking anti-parenthood. I’m talking about the fact that some people love it, some people don’t love it. It is not good, or bad; there shouldn’t be any judgment about it.

“You know, it is very possible to adore your children but not love parenting. I think some of us like to be lawyers, some of us like to be teachers. We don’t all love the same thing. So I think it’s absurd to think that everybody would love to be a parent.”

Clearly, some of us don’t relish the parent role and if our society gave us permission to choose childlessness there would likely not be as many parents abandoning kids at the emergency doors of a hospital in the state of Nebraska. And I’m not making a judgment about these parents.

Parenting is hard. Let’s not pretend that it’s not.

You Like Choice? Then Vote

I am a new citizen of the United States of America. A former green card holder, born in Canada, I will vote in a presidential election for the first time. After 17 years of paying taxes as a Resident Alien, without a vote, it is something I look forward to.

So I am pleased to see that voter registration is up. I was surprised when I first immigrated how low the voter turnout was for presidential elections. Yet, people complained about the current administration. My thought was let your vote do the talking.

So will you be mute, or will you speak, as is your right as a citizen?

VP Pick Leaves Me with No Choice

I’m childfree, and I am an independent, because I like the luxury of choice. Party, shmarty—just give me a candidate who can get the job done—red or blue, or green, or violet. I don’t care.

I’ve always admired McCain. I like his party outsider status. As the Senator from Arizona, he was the guy you could count on to reach across party lines and kick ass and take names. I like Obama, too. He’s smart but he’s not an egghead, he knows what’s doable and what’s not, given the resourses. He knows where his priorities lie, but he’s not an idealogue.

So I was happy with the presidential candidates, both were a welcomed departure from Dubya, so I was anticipating an interesting campaign season, where the outcome was uncertain. I was the Bachelorette, in the final episode. I was on the edge of my seat. My vote still to be wooed, I was looking forward to the final courtship process. The bended knee.

Then came Sarah Palin, leaving me with just one choice.

It wasn’t hate at first sight. I was pleased there was a woman VP candidate. We shared a few things in common. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, I could be found warming a seat at the hockey rink; my father was a hockey coach, he spent fall weekends hunting moose; there are family movies of my grandmother in a cap with ear flaps dragging a dead moose out of the woods.

So it wasn’t the pitpull with lipstick, frontier hunter/gatherer chick thing that turned me off. It was three simple things:

1. Under her watch as Mayor of Wasilla, victims of rape were expected to pay for their own rape kits.
2. She appears determined to defend abstinence-only education, despite direct and compelling evidence that an alarming number of young people who vow to stay virgins until married abandon ship like rats on a sinking ship, without life vests (read: condoms).
3. She hadn’t travelled outside of the United States and Canada until 2007 when she was Governor, having applied for her first passport so that she could visit Alaska-based troops in Iraq and Kuwait.

If Palin was the candidate for mayor in my hometown, I might overlook the passport thing, but I would be very concerned about the other two. But she’s not running for mayor, she’s running for Vice President, next in line to someone who, if he gets the votes, will be the oldest elected first-term president in our history.

I shudder. I imagine some factory in China doing double shifts trying to fill the next container full with Sarah Palin masks. It will be the scariest thing I see at my door this Halloween.